http://football.guardian.co.uk/continental/story/0,8018,931715,00.html Barca election pledge really scrapes the barrel There have been some bizarre election promises in this column's time, but promising to allow women into the dressing room surely takes the biscuit, writes Sid Lowe in Spain Monday April 7, 2003 Some people will do anything for power. History is littered with tremendous election promises, as vacuous and inflated as Tara Palmer-Tomkinson's head. Like the time an MP - who shall remain nameless (mainly because this column can't remember what she was called) - promised more sex under Labour. Or the Athletic Bilbao presidential candidate who tried to impose an eight-hour working day for all the staff - a move which proved about as popular with the players as a paediatrician on a Shadwell estate. This column's favourite pledge, though, came from Degrassi Junior High - a right-on, down-with-the-kids Canadian version of Grange Hill (only without the cockney accents and a subsequent career on EastEnders). The election campaign in question featured the school's alleged stunner Stephanie Kaye ("A-OK!") running for president under the brilliant pledge of "one vote, one kiss". One day Stephanie's "campaign manager" and sidekick, a squashed little dwarf with glasses - as, rather unfairly, they always are - suddenly realised the folly of the plan. The panic clear in her eyes, she rushed to the would-be school president and cried, "but Stephanie, what about the girls?!". To which our heroine replied, with a level of cool electioneering unbecoming of a fifteen year-old who avoids the watchful eye of her mother by changing into trendy clothes in the school toilets: "Don't worry, we've cornered the male constituency and there's two other candidates - so long as the girls' vote is split, we're home and dry!" That, at least, used to be this column's favourite ever pledge. Until this week, when one of the 475 people jostling for the FC Barcelona presidency gigglingly promised to allow women into the dressing room on match days and added: "It's worth it: Kluivert has a very long ... " After last year's alleged "party" in the Hesperia Hotel in Madrid, letting women straight into the dressing room could be seen as little more than cutting out the middle man, but the truth is that the Kluivert offer will fall on deaf ears and wide eyes. And not just because he may not be there much longer - Barça are considering a cheeky but legal reduction in his pay which would also see his buy-out clause drop to just 1.5m euros. The reason is simple: most Barça fans just want their club to be run by someone who is not an utter incompetent for a change. After three seasons of failure under Joan Gaspart, Barcelona need someone credible, someone who can steady the ship and start to claw back the territory on Real Madrid. And just about everyone else. They need someone who can sort of the club's debt, estimated at 60m euros by director Pérez Farguell (the amount borrowed to be able to reach the end of the season). They need someone who will say and do something positive and definitive - about the team, the manager, the club. Anything. And at some stage soon they'll need someone who can actually sign a cheque - so many directors have left that there isn't a nominated cheque and official document signer left at the club. Yet for Barcelona fans there's no sign of a solution. For all the jostling and manoeuvering, elections still haven't been set - current president Enric Reyna, who took over from Joan Gaspart, refuses to plump for a date while the club still has on-field "objectives" but it looks more than a little dodgy and leaving elections until the end of the season won't allow the incoming board time to do anything before next season. Reyna, though, continue to twist and turn like a snake at a 60s night - and many now suspect that he'd rather not call elections at all. He came in as a temporary, pacifying stop-gap; now he looks like man who desperately wants to hang onto power. And yet all he's really doing is making his possible even less likely than the female vote splitting candidates of Degrassi Junior High. All the more so with things once again looking wobbly out on the pitch. On Saturday night Barcelona lost the first game of Reyna's presidency - their first under Radi Antic. That might not sound so bad, but it is: Barça have been drawing like a hyperactive Tony Hart - their record for the last eleven games is worse than it was against the same teams under Louis Van Gaal. And if this weekend Barcelona only lost 2-0 against Villarreal, it was because they were lucky. Villarreal manager Benito Floro was not wrong when he said: "It's a shame it wasn't 8-3". The saving grace - and let's face it, a pretty good one - is, of course, the Champions League, but even there Barcelona seem to have ended up on a lower plane than their bitterest rivals - and not just in the pro-Madrid press. Well, not the openly pro-Madrid press. The reason is, of course, David Beckham and Manchester United, who together are threatening to take over the world, making this weekend's league fixtures feel like an awkward tag-on. There has been no escape, especially not for poor Steve McManaman, unimaginatively interviewed at least seven hundred times over the last two weeks. Almost as many times, in fact, as Ricardo - the latest in a long line of pointless Manchester United goalkeeping signings and a man with all the charisma of a lump of firewood. Everywhere you turn Ricardo grins back at you. He's been on the telly, the radio and in all the magazines, but the real barrel scraping was - as ever - perpetrated by Marca. They were given the Ricardo guided tour of Old Trafford and there, amidst the photos of the pitch, the Munich clock, and the bench, is a close-up, full-size, ringed shot of a peg. Well, it is David Beckham's peg.